Trump’s New Attorney General Directs Prosecutors to Pursue Harshest Sentences Possible

On Wednesday, newly confirmed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a flurry of memos that seek to advance President Trump’s oppressive, racist, and violent agenda. 

The memos can be found here, and we’ve highlighted some common themes below.

Killing Spree 2.0 

During his first term in office, President Trump launched a “killing spree,” carrying out more federal executions than the previous ten administrations combined. Under Bondi, the DOJ appears to be laying the groundwork to expand the use of the death penalty at both the state and federal levels. 

“There’s plenty to be concerned about how it might actually play out, but we will have to see,” Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, told The Appeal.

In addition to lifting the moratorium on federal executions adopted by the Biden administration, Bondi outlined new criteria to encourage federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in more cases.

Prosecutors have an enormous amount of discretion over who to charge, how serious the charges are, and what punishments to seek, including whether or not to pursue a death sentence. Bondi directs federal prosecutors to, whenever possible, charge people with the most serious crimes that carry the most severe sentences. 

She orders federal prosecutors to pursue death sentences for undocumented immigrants accused of capital crimes, as well as anyone charged with killing a law enforcement officer “[a]bsent significant mitigating circumstances.” The memo also revives guidelines adopted during the first Trump administration that encourage prosecutors to seek the death penalty against people charged with serious drug-related offenses. 

Singling out undocumented immigrants for capital charges appears unconstitutional, said Federal Public Defender Geremy Kamens

“It’s essentially saying, ‘We’re going to seek the death penalty based on national origin,’” he told The Appeal. “That violates the Constitution.”

Bondi also announced plans to review all ongoing cases in which federal prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty during the Biden administration. The memo says that the DOJ’s Capital Review Committee, which approves decisions on whether or not to seek the death penalty in eligible cases, will determine whether to overturn the previous administration’s decisions within the next 120 days. 

Most people sentenced to death were convicted in state courts; before Biden’s commutations, the federal death row held less than 2 percent of the country’s death row population. Bondi directs the Bureau of Prisons—the federal agency that oversees the federal prison system—to help states obtain the supplies needed to carry out death sentences. 

Many states have struggled to acquire the drugs used in lethal injections, leading some states to pursue experimental methods that may make executions more painful and less reliable. Bondi’s memo suggests that the federal government will help states avoid legal challenges by supplying them with drugs approved by past court decisions.

In another memo, Bondi promised to work with local prosecutors to pursue death sentences for the 37 people whose federal death sentences President Biden commuted to life in prison before he left office. Three people remain on federal death row. As of Friday, there are no scheduled federal executions.

Targeting Pro-Palestinian Student Protesters 

Bondi seems poised to go after pro-Palestinian protesters. Her newly announced Joint Task Force October 7 will prosecute “acts of terrorism, antisemitic civil rights violations, and other federal crimes committed by Hamas supporters in the United States, including on college campuses.”

College students have protested what is widely considered to be Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, perpetrated with U.S. taxpayer dollars. The activists have been falsely accused of supporting Hamas or being anti-Semitic, even though many of the protesters are Jewish. 

Jonah Rubin, the senior manager of campus organizing for Jewish Voice for Peace, told The Appeal that Bondi’s memo is part of the “far-right, authoritarian push to shut down not just pro-Palestine activism on campus, but really any kind of social justice activism on campus using the cover of anti-Semitism and terrorism laws.”

“It’s particularly offensive to us as Jewish Voice for Peace that this is being done using the excuse of Jewish safety,” he said. “Jewish safety has never been achieved through these types of repressive, authoritarian far-right actions.”

As The Appeal previously reported, police made more than 3,200 arrests at campus protests last year. An Appeal analysis of over 900 arrests revealed that state and local prosecutors had yet to file charges in nearly half of all cases. There were no federal prosecutions. 

“This directive is ambiguous by design to chill the free speech of student protesters and ignores the nationwide spike in anti-Muslim and Palestinian hate crimes, threats, and acts of intimidation,” said Robert S. McCaw, the director of government affairs for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR. “The federal government has always had the authority to go after terrorist organizations and this directive creates no new powers.” 

The task force will also investigate and prosecute “those responsible for funding Hamas,” but what this administration considers “Hamas” is not defined. The DOJ did not respond to The Appeal’s questions by the time of publication. 

More Attacks on Immigrants 

Bondi will use the DOJ to attack immigrants and their allies. In her directive on “sanctuary jurisdictions” she revives a policy from the first Trump administration that cuts funding to “sanctuary jurisdictions” even though several courts have ruled the policy unconstitutional. (Bondi’s directive only mentions one court that upheld the policy.) The case never went to the U.S. Supreme Court because Biden rescinded the policy when he took office.

The new directive goes after federal funding for non-governmental organizations, known as NGOs, that provide “support or services” to undocumented immigrants. The directive does not specify what constitutes support or services. 

The U.S. Attorney General’s office will pause funding for 60 days for current grantees, investigate them, and then determine if funding will resume. No new grants will be awarded to organizations that “support or provide services either directly or indirectly” to undocumented immigrants or those who are “removable.” 

A separate memo on enforcement priorities orders federal prosecutors to investigate “state and local actors” for “resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with” immigration enforcement efforts. Bondi cites specific charges to pursue in these cases, including a statute that bars state and local governments from restricting information sharing with federal immigration officials, as well as another provision that criminalizes “harboring” immigrants who entered the country illegally.

The memo also makes immigration enforcement one of the DOJ’s top priorities, ordering the department to transfer resources away from corruption and white-collar crime investigations to expand federal prosecutors’ capacity for pursuing immigration-related offenses. The memo includes illegal entry in its list of priority charges, recalling the “zero tolerance” policy adopted by the first Trump administration, which helped fuel the family separation crisis at the southern border. 

Bondi’s directive requires federal prosecutors to accept immigration cases brought to them by state and local law enforcement. It also mandates that prosecutors inform their superiors any time they choose to decline an immigration-related case. 

“To the Max”

Bondi’s memo on sentencing and charging decisions, demonstrates a radical departure from the bipartisan consensus around the failures of the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing schemes. She orders prosecutors “in the absence of unusual facts … [to] charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.”

She rescinded several of Attorney Garland’s directives, including his 2022 memo which directed prosecutors to  only pursue charges that would result in a mandatory minimum sentence after an individualized assessment of the circumstances, noting that these sentences have “often caused unwarranted disproportionality in sentencing and disproportionately severe sentences.” 

In an accompanying memo, issued the same day, Garland directed prosecutors to treat crack cocaine the same as powder cocaine in their charging and sentencing decisions. He reiterated the Justice Department’s opposition to the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity, which has no basis in science. It is unclear if this memo is rescinded as well although Bondi’s directive states that, “Any inconsistent previous policy of the Department of Justice relating to charging, plea negotiations, and sentencing is rescinded, effective today.”

The Department of Justice did not respond to an email requesting clarification before publication. The Appeal will update this story when additional information is available.  

Bondi’s memo “upends that approach to drug cases in particular, but all cases with mandatory minimums,” Kamens told The Appeal. 

“The policy of the new memo is to seek the most readily provable, most serious penalty available,” he said. “The presumption is unless a case is unusual, the government should go to the max.”